‘The old saying “The camera cannot lie”, is wrong of course. Photography is not objective. Firstly, every photograph is an abstract, a transformation of colour values into the grey-scale. already here there are endless possibilities of subjective representation. Secondly, only a small tone-scale is at our disposal in which to express the infinite wealth of tone values which we find in nature, from gleaming white down to the deepest black; it comprises only the thousandth even ten-thousandth, part of the original tone-scale. Thus we have not only to find an analogy to colour, we have also to transpose the entire graduation of light intensity. Thus consideration of style, of composition, play an important role in “objective” photography in addition to technical considerations, and, most of all, the personal conception of nature and ability to re-create. The photographic problem goes, therefore, much deeper than the mere depiction of something seen in the world of phenomena.’

Helmut Gernsheim in New Photo Vision, Fountain Press, 1942.